Note 389 — Chapter V · UNIVERSITY MEN AND NATIONAL MOVEMENTS

“The first of the great English writers in whom letters asserted an almost public importance.” In the new ‘republic of letters’ Dryden was “chosen chief”; “He had done more than any man to create a literary class”; “he was the first to impress the idea of literature on the English mind.” Master “alike of poetry and prose, covering the fields both of imagination and criticism.... Dryden realized in his own personality the existence of a new power which was thenceforth to tell steadily on the world ... our literature obeyed the impulse he had given it from the beginning of the eighteenth century till near its close.”—J. R. Green.